The Truth About Scientology's Xenu

Okay. There's a lot to unpack here, but it would be irresponsible to the point of criminal negligence if we didn't start with a health warning. According to the Church of Scientology, it's altogether possible that you'll die of pneumonia if you keep reading this without first completing a rigorous course of auditing and progressing to Operational Thetan level III. It's going to cost a lot of money, but you can't put a dollar sign on your health. We'll wait.

The doctrine of the Church of Scientology has its good guys and its bad guys, just like any other religion. On the side of the angels, you have L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific writer of speculative and historical fiction whose first name, and this is true, was "Lafayette." In the darker corner of the ring, there's Xenu, the deposed ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, an interplanetary government composed of 76 planets, 26 stars, and, helpfully for anyone interested in getting work as a set dresser for the unproduced film adaptation Revolt in the Stars, a bunch of people who dressed and behaved very much like average Americans in the 1950s and 60s.

The time: 75 million years ago. The setting: outer space. According to Hubbard, Xenu was troubled by the potentially disastrous levels of overpopulation in his interstellar kingdom and within a Flerken's whisker of being removed from power. Hoping to kill two space birds with one moon stone, he enlisted the help of local psychiatrists to gather up billions of his subjects under the pretense of holding an income tax inspection.

Do you have pneumonia yet? Okay, let's keep going.

In a maniacal plot twist, Xenu used glycol and alcohol to paralyze his citizens and capture their souls, which he then transported to Earth (then called "Teegeeack") in ships that looked like DC-8 planes but without propellers, although it would be more fair to say that DC-8s look like the spaceships since their design was the result of latent memories from the spirits of Xenu's victims. Xenu then had the souls dropped at the bases of volcanoes, which he bombarded with hydrogen bombs, releasing their tortured essences into the atmosphere of Teegeeack, then captured in vacuum zones and forced to watch 3D movies of "misleading data" on massie movie screens for thirty six days.

You seem wheezy. Fight through the pneumonia, we're almost there.

After being released from the screenings, the thetans clumped together and adjoined themselves to human forms, where they still reside today. You can get them removed through auditing and the spiritual guidance of the Church of Scientology, but again, it's very expensive.

And as for Xenu? Well, luckily he was overthrown by the Loyal Enforcers, a group of goodhearted soldiers of the Galactic Confederacy. They then imprisoned Xenu in an electric mountain from which he has yet to escape, and the Galactic Confederacy left Earth as an abandoned prison planet.

All of this comes from reports by former Scientologists, uncovered church documents from their many legal disputes, and the aforementioned script for Hubbard's planned on screen adaptation of the story, which we can thank our lucky stars never got produced because, again, learning about this just now gave you pneumonia. It might also be worth noting that Hubbard, in letters to his wife from the time of his enlightenment on the subject, mentioned that he was mixing uppers with downers and washing them down with rum, according to a book published by his son. Also, he couldn't quite decide whether it was spelled "Xenu" or "Xemu," and Marvel Comics published a story half a decade before Hubbard's doctrine about a space monster named Xemnu who was trapped in an electric prison orbiting the sun.

But whatever. Get some rest. You look short of breath.